Goal

Our main app, c0d3.com, teaches students how to code. Part of the curriculum involves writing server-side code, so we needed a place for students to deploy their code to show the world.

We couldn't find a deployment tool that fit our needs, so we decided to build our own—MyProxy.

We knew we needed a tool that could do the following really well:

Setup

  1. Have a web UI that asks for your domain provider's API credentials (e.g. name.com)
  2. Once you put in your API credentials, display all the domains that you own
  3. Set up a domain and handle SSL certificate exchange by simply clicking a button

Usage

https://gifs.com/gif/setupmyproxy-p8n0KQ

  1. Once a domain has been set up, create as many subdomains as the user needs to host their apps
  2. Deploy from the student's computer through a simple command such as git push remote master

Journey

Throughout building MyProxy, we knew we were going to dog food (test and use) our own product. When we finally did, everything worked beautifully.

While we polished MyProxy to get it ready to show the open source community, we got a few of our developer friends on board as our first external users. They loved it. We even got a friend to convince his team at work to use our app on their servers to deploy demo apps.

Shout out to our friends proudly running their apps from their servers at home:

We knew our open source app would be helpful to many other developers who wanted to deploy apps quickly, so we planned a launch date.

Launch 1 - 12/24/2019

We didn't have much experience launching apps, but we started out by posting MyProxy on:

HackerNews (24), Reddit (11), Indiehackers (5), and ProductHunt (13).

These postings didn't increase the number of interactions on our open source page, but organically getting 24 points on HackerNews was pretty cool.

Launch 2 - 12/28/2019